(There may be spoilers here, so if you haven't read all the books, you may want to stop reading this.)
There are 17 of the books, and I have listened to all but three of them.
I enjoy the books and like the characters.
My one complaint is that several of Penny's characters have head injuries from which they completely recover. (If I have names wrong it's because I listen to the audiobooks so I haven't the names spelled out on a page.)
Gamache is shot in the head and makes a full recovery, aside from a slight tremor in his hand.
Isabelle LaCost, one of his investigators, has a head injury, and makes a full recovery, except for a slight limp that appears to have disappeared, but I'll know more as I finish up book #17.
Stephen somebody, the 93-year-old godfather of Gamache, (he shows up later in the series) is run over by a van and has a head injury. He lies in a coma for most of the book - and makes a full recovery. (This one in particular I found quite difficult. He's 93. Really?)
I know this is fiction, and in a fictional world I suppose anyone can be shot in the head and make a full recovery. I also know that in real life, such things do not happen. If people do recover from a head trauma, they generally are greatly changed, either in personality or in body or both, because recovery can take not weeks, but months and/or years.
I would very much like for Penny to find another place for a main character to be injured besides in the head. A shot in the knee, perhaps.
The head injuries and subsequent quick recoveries pull me from the world of the book. My rational mind jumps in and says, "This cannot be." Anything that distracts a reader from the world of the book is something that needs to be reexamined.
That this has happened at least three times (there may be others that I'm not recalling), makes me think that a head wound is this author's go-to injury. And that would be fine, I suppose, if I hadn't lost a friend to a head trauma after she was run over by a truck, if I hadn't watched an older person have a TIA right in front of me during a newspaper interview, if a friend from college hadn't been in a car wreck and then spent years in therapy relearning how to live her life, if someone else I know hadn't had a head injury and then gone berserk and tried to murder his family a long time ago.
But I know these things, and have some experience with head trauma, however slight, and I don't think my knowledge is anything special. However, it's enough to pull me from the story when the head trauma injuries miraculously heal without much time passing.
This is mostly a note for me to remind myself that, if I ever do find my voice for fiction, that I need to be sure not to pull the reader from the world of the book by using an inappropriate prop for authorial purposes, instead of reaching for a harder or more prudent incident that would keep the reader in the story.
I have noticed this, too! Those Louise Penney is hardly the only one guilty of this. Just about EVERY cop show since kinescopes were aired has detectives taking knocks to the head, passing out, and then bouncing back. Sports entertainment, too. It does ignore the important reality of what happens when one takes a knock to the head.
ReplyDeleteI've watched my friend Henry become virtually incapacitated by a TBI. A local sportscaster, Mike Adamle, unraveled on our TV screens every night when the cumulative effects of football head injuries caught up with him.
Head injuries are sad and serious. I doubt authors and screenwriters would use cancer this way.
One of my best friends works in the state's only head trauma clinic and we've talked about how sad it is to be used as a literary device. But we still love Louise Penny's stories.
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